New USB 3.2 design announced, offering double the bandwidth of USB 3.1 ports and hitting the market next year.

Despite countless attempts to do away with the USB port, it continues to lead in connectivity for storage drives, peripherals, and just about anything. We currently have several standards available, being USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 in its Type-A and Type-C variant, but there is a new standard that will arrive shortly, USB 3.2. This port has been developed by the USB 3.0 Promoter team, which is made up of Intel, Apple, Texas Intruments and Microsoft, among other brands. The highlight of USB 3.2 is that it doubled the bandwidth of USB 3.1.

We must say that USB 3.1 offers us a bandwidth of 10Gbps, while USB 3.2 will offer a bandwidth of 20Gbps. As with all USB ports, backward compatibility between the different standards is maintained. This has been achieved through a multi-line design, integrating two lines that can operate with a 5Gbps or 10Gbps data transfer, all while maintaining the current cables, something that is the highlight. Not only this, smartphones will also benefit greatly, as loading times will be significantly reduced.

This means that we will have an improvement in the performance of these ports, with respect to those offered to us today, since these were developed thinking of previous generations, such as USB 3.0. What this means is that devices that have USB 3.1 firmware can be updated to this new standard, through compatibility between systems. Predictably during the USB Developer Days 2017 to be held on August 21, we should see the full specifications. These USB ports are expected to arrive in 2019.